The backlash to “Snow Fall” is that it’s an indulgence
only the Times can afford. It took them six months and a powerful
multi-person dev team to hand-code it. Most news orgs don’t have
anywhere near these kinds of resources, and this is why we’ve spent
the past year creating a tool that opens the ability to produce
these stories to significantly more people.

This is a good point, even though we should note that it’s in
service of promoting his company, and it’s not something many
people want to say in public. (Update: We want to be clear
that, yeah, there was not actually SIX MONTHS of coding. That’s way
over the top.) Privately, the kvetching about Snow Fall among
“media people” has been pretty intense. Each time this topic comes
up around journalism profs or reporters, there’s a huge amount of
eye-rolling. That eye-rolling is always, however, as it should be,
preceded by praise: it was great work, it needed to be done, all
that jazz. Everyone appreciates the labor; they just don’t
think it changes everything. There’s generally five ideas people
bring up.

Their points generally are:

• Although it was an exceedingly well-reported story that lent
itself well to lovely web expression, the story itself was not
particularly newsworthy, or recent, or ground-breaking, or
exclusive.

• During the story’s construction, it became a situation where
it seemed—at least from the outside—like the form began to demand
unreasonable length of the content.

• It was a monetary sinkhole: while the coding seems spectacular
(and it didn’t destroy browsers, unlike recent efforts by
Pitchfork), the sheer person-hours devoted to it were financially
untenable.

• The obvious lack of involvement of the sales team at the paper
was incredibly short-sighted.

• With an average of 12 minutes on site for its visitors (which
is to be fair very, very long!), there’s still no way most visitors
actually read that story. They came for spectacle.

The off-record beefing about Snow Fall in many ways isn’t even
Snow Fall’s fault! It’s the hubbub that surrounded it after—all the
Snow Fall will save media baloney. We all like Snow
Fall, we’re just tired of having to hear about it at conference
after conference and panel after panel. Besides: not made like that
it won’t “save journalism.” No way.

It’s a shame that the Snow Fall model eclipsed the Nate Silver
model in the imagination of the “future of journalism” crowd. In
early 2012, 1% of Times readers were reading Nate Silver; as
the election drew near, on a single day,
20% of Times readers came to read Nate. Using traffic
from September of 2012, the Times was doing about 8 to 9
million people a day overall, in Comscore numbers (so: vastly
undercounted probably, and as the election drew near, traffic
surely increased).

So Nate Silver basically did Snow Fall-level traffic in just a
single day. As cyclical as politics traffic obviously is, that’s
still a much better future of journalism—and a much better use of
budget.